ABSTRACT
England had been swept by a culture of extrovert showmanship and spectacle that sometimes bordered on outright charlatanism. The borders between the visible and invisible peculiar to electrical phenomena also positioned scientific research in the demesne of theology. Ideas about an electrical life force and about the possibility, and potential benefits and dangers, of using man's increasing mastery of electrical phenomena to control such a force both by theorists of natural philosophy and through the burgeoning commercial cultures of print and public performance. Research in electricity revealed phenomena that could easily be demonstrated, so the field of research was particularly well suited for public presentations by itinerant scholars. In 1791, a mob burnt Joseph Priestley's apparatus and library in Birmingham, vividly illustrating the risks of too close association with the rhetoric of Enlightenment philosophes. For the rest of the century, electrical performers, and electrical science in general, were often viewed with suspicion– despite, or indeed because of, their continued popularity.
